Hawaii Night Drive

For Spring Break my senior year, two of my girlfriends and I flew to Hawaii to stay with my friend’s cousin on the Big Island. Our flight, as it turned out, got in about midnight, on the opposite end of the island, so we had to drive three hours in the dark to get there. I, as the designated navigator, had to stay awake and keep the driver company while our third friend passed out in the back seat. We were exhausted and still wound up after getting pulled over for a bogus speeding ticket not five minutes out of the airport. (We found out later that our white Dodge Caliber was pretty much THE tourist car, and therefore, marked us as easy prey). The rural areas of Hawaii are pretty dark at night, and so we were navigating these winding roads almost blindly, with this huge full moon hanging over us. It was all very surreal, and we had our windows down and iPod cranked up to keep us from falling asleep at the wheel—combined with the sugar we consumed to keep us awake, it made for a very hyper pilot and co-pilot. We were hitting the peak of our sugar high, making jokes about corrupt cops/serial killers in disguise suddenly appearing at the side of the road, when Enrique Iglesias’s Don’t Turn Off the Lights came on. We were just laughing about how he was warning us about said serial killers when a white, pale hand stretched out between the seats and poked me in the shoulder. I screamed probably about as loudly as I’ve ever screamed, and the girl driving nearly swerved off the road. It turned out that our backseat friend wasn’t actually asleep—and we laughed hysterically about it for the next fifteen minutes, with Enrique going “EEYAH EEYAY” in the background. That pretty much set the tone for the rest of the trip.